[2019] Consolidated Performance Issues Thread - Week of 9/30/2019

Thank you very much for putting together this post!

Rest assured, we are aware of these issues and we are working hard to resolve them. Definitely keep the bug reports coming. We do read them and we do take them seriously.

I'm the tech lead for the client, so I wanted to chime in to give you guys some context on the issues we are investigating and give some ideas on how to help us solve them.

[Warning: You are about to get a whole bunch of engineer speak.]

1. Unity Crash

This is the one we are most concerned about right now. It definitely seemed to start hitting a lot more people around the 9/4 release. We are looking into what changed but also trying to understand what's causing the issue. It generally appears to be an issue with the game running out of memory. That's why you'll be fine for a bit, but then it will crash seemingly randomly.

What's weird to us is that we are seeing situations where we didn't actually use up that much memory with the game itself, but somehow the process is taking up a ton of memory right out of the gate.

If any of you are wondering why your machine with 16GB+ of RAM is crashing after something like 3GB, it's because Arena is a 32-bit application, so it can only use between 2GB and 4GB, depending on various other factors. This holds true even on a 64-bit operating system.

The best way to help with this issue is to file a report and be sure to include the following:

• Your Wizards of the Coast email or your display names so we can find the session and look for anything unusual.
• A DxDiag report so we can start tracking patterns in hardware and drivers experiencing the crash
• The time of the crash (including time zone)
• As always, the more detail you put in your report, the more likely it is to help us find and fix the issue

For some extra credit, bring up the in-game performance window with Shift-Period and describe how the bottom three numbers are behaving (TOTAL, ALLOC, MONO). Where do they start, where do they end, how fast do they rise or fall. If you can catch them before a crash, it can tell us what kind of memory problem you might be experiencing.

If the numbers are behaving (They really should all be under 1000, but for long sessions, they can get larger), then the next step would be to get Process Explorer and look at the memory number for MTGA.exe. Find the process in the list, right-click it and open the properties page. Go to the performance tab and tell us what's happening with the Virtual Memory and Physical Memory sections.

2. Choppy performance

There are a number of circumstances in the game where the action will freeze up momentarily. This can be a small hitch or it could hang for several seconds. We never want to see this happen. We think we generally know the causes: a combination of disk reads, cleaning up unused memory, and expensive game state calculating (The client doesn't evaluate rules, but it has to do some heavy lifting to give you the rich Magic experience you deserve). We have solutions for these, but they will take some time for our excellent engineers to implement them.

There is another possible cause that is perplexing us. We have reports from users that connect their graphical hitches to the quality of their Internet connection. I have a tricky ask for you guys. When you see a card freeze in place, see if you can find an element on the battlefield that is constantly in motion. Some good candidates include little critters that run around the board, the elemental cat or the glowy effect on the phase button. If part of the game freezes, but other elements are animating like nothing it wrong, then the issue is related to either unhealthy network conditions or high server load. But if everything totally stops in place, we most likely have a CPU issue on our hands. Hopefully, it's one of the issues identified above so we can get it resolved.

When you file your bug report, include the standard information I asked for above, but also try and describe:

• What game actions were associated with the larger freezes
• If the whole game froze or just the gameplay

3. Degraded performance after several games

Most users have noticed some amount of performance degradation after several games. Many of you resort to restarting the game every few matches. We certainly don't want you to have to go through that. This degradation is most likely caused by some memory we are leaking. To get a little more technical, the managed heap grows a little bit each game and some of it doesn't ever get reclaimed. The larger the heap gets, the longer each garbage collection operation takes. So the hitches get progressively worse. Investigation into the source of this leak is ongoing

4. Black screen on game start

This isn't actual a performance issue, but sure as heck isn't any fun. We are pretty sure this is just a good ol' software bug (For my engineer friends: It's a network timing issue). It's kind of tricky to track it down, but we are working on it.

Thank you all so much for your passion and your patience. We really want to get these issues fixed so we can all experience this game we love at the quality it (and you) deserve.

T.J.

Yah, we've definitely been giving the HD3000 the side eye. You aren't the only group with the issue, but the 3000s have gotten a pretty big uptick since 9/4. We have one coming into the office tomorrow so we can bang on it. Thanks for sticking with us.

A quick update on our progress on our findings. We have identified a couple of issues that, in conjunction, lead to frequent crashes for some users. We are working on getting a fix to you. As always, I cannot promise a specific timeline, but it's in the works.

[Techy details follow for those who are curious]

Since integrated GPUs don't have any VRAM, they borrow from main memory. So, for example, if we are using 2GB of graphics memory and 2GB of system memory, an integrated GPU will use 4GB and crash a 32-bit program. Kind of a simplification, but it's pretty close.

The HD3000 (and probably a few others from that era) also seem to exhibit weird behavior where it uses up way more than we'd expect, even from an integrated GPU. For example, am HD5500 winds up using less than 1.5GB at game start, whereas an HD3000 winds up using more than 2.5GB. We are looking into the source of this discrepancy.

But why did it get so much worse recently? In a recent release, memory usage increased in a certain phase of the loading process. Since users of the HD3000 were already kind of in the danger zone, this pushed them over the edge.

So we're going to fix that as well as looking into getting memory usage down as a whole and figuring out why some GPUs grab so much more than we would expect.

Thanks again for your patience. We look forward to getting you back into the game.

Lots of Magic players are still on 32-bit windows and we want to be as inclusive as possible. We'd love to provide both, but that's further down the road.